The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review an appeal brought by Khaled el-Masri, a German national who alleged that he was kidnapped by CIA agents in Europe and held in an Afghan prison. El-Masri's lawsuit was dismissed, not on the merits, but on the "state secrets privilege" ground. This is not totally surprising, but it suggests that...
Registration is now open for International Law Weekend 2007, the annual conference of the American Branch of the International Law Association, which takes place at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York October 25-27. The full program --in which Opinio Juris regulars and many of our alumni are participating -- and registration information is...
If you plan to be in southern California on Saturday, October 20, 2007, you should consider coming to my home institution, Pepperdine Law School, to hear 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus speak about microfinancing. Everyone is welcome although space is limited and pre-registration is required. In order to register online, or learn more details about the...
The Newark Star-Ledger ran an article in its Sunday Edition on Baher Azmy, Mark Denbeaux, John Gibbons, and the Seton Hall Law School’s project on Guantanamo. As the article explains in its opening section:John Gibbons, a retired federal judge who taught law at Seton Hall for 24 years, won a landmark ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that prisoners captured...
Along with Julian, I had the good fortune to participate in a symposium last week at Fordham Law School on "International Law and The Constitution: Terms of Engagement." Details about the symposium are available here. The Fordham Law Review will devote a symposium issue to the conference in the near future. Here are a few quotes...
Today's LA Times has an op-ed I wrote arguing that states need to tailor the law of war and the prohibition on the use of force to cyberspace. This is a shorter version of a piece I posted on SSRN a few months ago (more details here). I'm still working on a longer, law-review length treatment now so...
Early reports suggest that Costa Rican voters have narrowly approved Costa Rica's accession to the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Costa Rica is the only party to CAFTA that has submitted the agreement to a referendum. Such up or down votes on free trade deals rarely occur through the referendum process. Indeed, treaties and other international agreements almost never...
Here's a strange case I came across that I thought you might enjoy. It seems one Quintin Littlejohn had his own ideas about how to handle the situation in Kosovo and was upset with how the International Court of Justice was hijacking his issue. So he sues the ICJ. Here is an excerpt of the decision of...
Now this is a heartwarming picture depicting the presidents of Honduras and Nicaragua in a friendly embrace, a far cry from the tense days of the Contra Wars in the 1980s, which involved Honduran and U.S. support for Nicaraguan rebels. Indeed, things have gotten so friendly that both Presidents have pledged to meet at the site of the disputed border area...
Remember the killer badgers and cyborg spy squirrels? Well, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Consider the following report from the EE Times:Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its '"HI-MEMS" program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS--a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency...
I am part of a wonderful international arbitration listserve and in the past couple of days there has been an interesting exchange regarding whether international arbitrators or international judges are more prone to bias. One prominent academic at the London School of Economics had this to say: I see it more as a matter of established principle than theory that...
What? You thought the Korean War ended fifty years ago? Actually, the Panmunjom Agreement, concluded on June 27, 1953, was merely an armistice agreement. It provided for a cease-fire and created a military demarcation line between North and South Korea. It did not, however, provide any terms for normalizing relations among the participants, which is what a...
